This release just came over the transom:
S.C. REP. BILL COTTY ANNOUNCES HE WILL NOT RUN FOR RE-ELECTION
COLUMBIA — House District 79 Representative Bill Cotty announced that he
has accepted a private sector job opportunity that will result in his not
seeking re-election in 2008.
"Over the Holidays one of my long-time clients made me a wonderful business
offer," Cotty said. While the terms we agreed on will allow me to serve out
my current term, I’ve promised to work with them full time after the House
adjourns in June."
"I’ve been blessed by voters to have the honor of serving in elected office
the past 20 years, eight on the Richland Two School Board, and the 14 in the
House. It’s time now to give someone else a chance and I wanted to let
folks now immediately so anyone interested in running has time to decide
before filing deadline at the end of March."
"This is an opportunity for me to work on innovative land use planning
projects that incorporate new technologies for recycling and resource
conservation practices, something I’m very passionate about. My wife and I
have places to go and grand babies to hug, the fifth of which is expected in
May."
Rep. Cotty is a Columbia Attorney and was first elected to the House in
1994. House District 79 encompasses Kershaw and Northeastern Richland
counties.-30-
I certainly wish Mr. Cotty well in the future, but he will be missed in the Legislature. The Richland Republican has been a stalwart supporter of public schools in an era in which out-of-state, anti-public-education money has been spent by the bucketload to try to get rid of real conservatives (the kind who support society’s fundamental institutions, as opposed to the libertarian radicals who want to tear them down) like him.
So that’s a few thousand bucks that SCouRGe and its fellows will save in smearing Mr. Cotty’s name in this year’s primaries.
Beyond that, it will be interesting to see if Anton Gunn takes time away from the Barack Obama campaign (which we assume will still be going strong at the time) to make another run at the seat. He was a very promising newcomer, make District 79 one of those few districts with an embarrassment of riches — a choice between two very good candidates, rather than the all-too-common opposite situation.
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> the kind who support society’s
> fundamental institutions, as opposed to
> the libertarian radicals who want to tear > them down
Absolutely. I mean all the public schools need is a couple more decades and a couple billion more dollars and we should start to see some improvement. Ask some parents whether the public schools are getting better or worse…
I forget… What exactly has Jim Rex done this past year to improve public schools? I mean besides photo ops and rigged grants for the districts that support him? He was going to deal with PACT, right? And he was going to institute a fantastic public school choice program, right?
Doug, here are a couple questions to help readers gauge your credibility on this issue.
What is the purpose of education? If you are so sure the schools are performing so poorly, surely you can provide specifics.
On what measures do you base your caustic judgment? PACT? SAT? As you cite your evidence, hopefully beyond the subjective opinions of a handful of neighbors, explain how they measure the goal of education.
From your previous posts, it has been clear to me that you base the majority of analysis on subjective and narrow personal experiences. To help you out, I’ve provided some objective statistics.
In the latest NAEP math scores (nation, apples to apples comparison), SC was just below the median in 4th grade math scores and at the median in 8th grade math scores.
When comparing white students in both these 4th and 8th grade math scores, only 13 and 5 states respectively scored higher than SC.
When comparing students who are NOT eligible for the National School Lunch program, it’s only 11 and 4 states higher respectively than SC.
I hardly find that evidence that SC schools are “getting worse”, of course I was relying on academics and not Alice down the street.
I’m sorry to see Bill isn’t going to run again. He’s a super guy and a great supporter of education. I wish him good luck.
I agree that Gunn should try again.
Randy,
Keep whistling past the graveyard…
I’ll ask you – are the students who you see in your math classes better prepared than they were five or ten years ago? Do you see a positive impact from a decade of PACT testing? If there is no noticeable difference in the Math ability of the students, why bother with PACT testing?
Is the discipline in your classroom better now than it was five years ago?
Do you and your fellow teachers sit around the teacher’s lounge basking in the joy of teaching students today?
I’ve given you my view as a parent who has his third child starting public high school.
I’ve got a wife who has worked in the school district for nearly ten years. Should I believe your statistics or my lying eyes?
Tell us what a teacher sees. Don’t give me statistics, give me reality. What’s better about the students and about the teaching profession today? What has Jim Rex done to make your job better this past year?
Link to the SC Dept. of Ed competitive grants
process… seems worthy of some actual news reporting doesn’t it?
Is this legal?
And to answer your questions, Randy (in hopes that you will answer mine):
What is the purpose of education? Simple. To learn something that is either meaningful, personally fulfulling, or both. This means that if you don’t think you have any longterm need to understand a quadratic equation, then perhaps your time would be better spent learning something that would be more practical. Unfortunately, public education relies heavily on the “one size fits all” concept where hundreds of hours of classroom time is spent on concepts that a large percentage of students have no real need to learn. The overemphasis on higher math has always been confusing. Personally, I would rather see math beyond Algebra left as electives and more classroom time invested in skills that are typically more useful beyond high school – communication, reading, writing, economics, personal finance, government. We’d probably be able to reduce the dropout rate by readjusting the curriculum toward those skills.
On what to I base my caustic judgement? Well, should we start with the school report cards? The system set up by the educrats clearly shows the schools are doing worse, doesn’t it? If a school district is rated Good when it once was rated Excellent is that positive? Or is the system of measurement broken (as I have stated for years)?
I can also send you the spreadsheet with 2006 / 2007 PACT scores if you’d like.
Some of the “highlights” from the most recent scores in terms of percentage of students scoring Basic or better on the exams:
Grade 3: Down in Science and Social Studies
Grade 4: down in English, Math, Science, and Social Studies.
Grade 5: down in Math, Science, and Social Studies
Grade 6: down in English, Science, and Social Studies
Grade 7: down in Math, Science, and Social Studies
Grade 8: down in English, Math, and Science
The science and social studies scores were down significantly across the board.
So you can cherry pick your statistics or you can use the ones set up by our own education department. Do you reject the PACT scores as valid indicators of progress?
Doug,
Basing a perspective on personal anectdotal evidence is inherently “cherry picking”. You ask about my students now compared to 10 years ago. Back then I had a student shoot a man dead but I have no felons this year. Hence, my students are better now.
Anyone with knowledge of time related data understands the fluctuations so a drop one year in PACT scores is no surprise. By the way, who exactly structured these report cards? Who exactly are these “educrats”?
You offer contradictory positions, criticizing the schools based on these measurements then you question the validity of these measurements.
I don’t question that there are serious problems in education. My issue is how you and others suggest our schools are failing as a whole. I find this to be specious and insulting to those of us in the profession.
BTW, have you read “Feeding the Green Monster”? It’s the background to Henry et al taking over. If you haven’t, I’ll district mail it to your wife for you to read on the road.
> Anyone with knowledge of time related data
> understands the fluctuations so a drop one
> year in PACT scores is no surprise.
Across most subjects in six grade levels?
What if it happens again next year? Still not a problem? What if over a ten year period, there is no measurable improvement?
At what point do we stop using statistics as the way to measure whether a school system is better?
I offer the contradictory positions to demonstrate that you can’t have it both ways. If you are going to expend valuable teaching time and resources measuring something, then the measurement better be a) worthwhile and b) used to change the system to make it better. I know the latter is not happening so if the former is not valid either, then maybe we should scrap the whole system.
Schools may not be failing as a whole but there is no indication they are getting BETTER under the current system despite significant increases in spending and testing. My position on schools is the same as my position on government – stop wasting taxpayer money on inefficient and wasteful processes that do not work. Pay teachers more, get rid of teachers who don’t teach (they do exist), give principals more local authority, consolidate school districts, revamp the curriculum to match the needs of a 21st century economy, enforce much stronger discipline policies, provide significantly more vocational education opportunities. I believe those policies would result in a better public school system that wouldn’t require two weeks of testing every year to measure.
As for the Henry book – sounds good. Thanks.
I will also be very, very sorry to see Bill go… he’s a man of tremendous integrity and common sense. As for Anton Gunn, we’ll see lots of him in the future, one way or another.
Socialist educrats constantly make excuses for their inability to educate poor children. They blame the family (actually the absence of family).
Yet they refuse to teach morality or sex education which stigmatizes the out-of-wedlock birth rates which are the root cause of poverty in South Carolina.
They cry for smaller classes, but oppose expulsion and deportation of illegal aliens who enlarge classes. Do they care about quality of results, or about packing the schools in order to get the head count for matching state and federal dollars?
They say they need more pay for better teachers, but they oppose using higher pay to replace the current teachers. What is the point of paying more money to the teachers they claim are so inferior?